Rattus turkestanicus (Satunin, 1903)

Guy G. Musser & Michael D. Carleton, 1993, Order Rodentia - Family Muridae, Mammal Species of the World (2 nd Edition), Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. 501-755 : 661-662

Rattus turkestanicus (Satunin, 1903) . Ann. Mus. Zool. Acad. Imp. Sci. St. Petersbourg, 7:588.

TYPE LOCALITY: Kirghizia, Oshskaya Obi., Lenniskii p-h, Arslanbob (= "Assam-bob"; see Pavlinov and Rossolimo, 1987) .

DISTRIBUTION: Records are from Kirghizia, NE Iran, N and E Afghanistan, N Pakistan, N India (Kashmir, Sikkim), Nepal, and S China (Yunnan and Guangdong) (see Musser and Newcomb, 1985:15).

SYNONYMS: celsus, gilgitianus, khumbuensis, rattoides ( Hodgson, 1845, not Pictet and Pictet, 1844), shigarus, vicerex (see Corbet, 1978c; Musser and Newcomb, 1985).

COMMENTS: Despite continued use of rattoides for this complex ( Caldarini et al., 1989; Corbet, 1978c), it is a synonym of R. rattus (Schütter and Thonglongya, 1971) . Three distinctive morphological, chromosomal, and geographic forms are included under turkestanicus ( Caldarini et al., 1989; Niethammer and Martens, 1975) and were first recognized by Hinton (1922) who treated all three as species ( R. turkestanicus , R. vicerex , and R. rattoides ) but also suggested that each may instead be a welldifferentiated subspecies. Rattus turkestanicus and R. vicerex were reported to occur sympatrically in Kashmir ( Chakraborty, 1983), but those identifications have to be verified. A careful systematic treatment is needed to determine whether the three groups represent species or geographic variants.

Oldest name for the complex is pyctoris ( Hodgson, 1845; incorrectly listed as a synonym of R. nitidus by Ellerman, 1961) and would either replace turkestanicus if all samples represent a single species, or would identify Nepal and Sikkim populations.